async

This two-part series is a gentle introduction to offline web development. Getting a web application to do something while offline is surprisingly tricky, requiring a lot of things to be in place and functioning correctly. We're going to cover all of these pieces from a high level, with working examples. This post is an overview, but there are plenty of more-detailed resources listed throughout.

ES2017 was finalized in June, and with it came wide support for my new favorite JavaScript feature: async functions! If you've ever struggled with reasoning about asynchronous JavaScript, this is for you. If you haven't, then, well, you're probably a super-genius.

Async functions more or less let you write sequenced JavaScript code, without wrapping all your logic in callbacks, generators, or promises. (more…)